LANE LAMBERT: New museum in Alabama gives dignity to victims of lynching

Lane Lambert The Patriot Ledger @llambert_ledger

Friday

Nov 23, 2018 at 3:01 AM

MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The first markers you see inside the National Memorial for Peace And Justice are at eye level – rusted, coffin-sized, thin steel slabs, each with a roster of lynching victims and the date of their murder cut into the hollow metal.

The farther you walk along the memorial’s inclined path and corners, the slabs rise higher and higher overhead, suspended as African-American lynching victims were when they were strung up on tree limbs across the South.

White Southerners didn’t talk about lynching when my wife Margie and I were growing up in segregated Alabama, at least not openly or around their children. They didn’t have to, because the ghosts were always in the shadows. Somehow we knew. Now the Equal Justice Initiative’s memorial has brought the light of history to more than 4,400 men, women and children who were hanged, shot or burned alive from the 1870s through the 1940s.

That history found its way into Mississippi’s special U.S. Senate election just two weeks ago, when a video surfaced in which acting Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith said of a cattle rancher who’d just endorsed her, "If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row."

The NAACP and other critics – including her Democratic, African-American challenger Mike Espy – said the remark was deeply offensive, especially in the state where the highest number of lynchings were committed. EJI documented 654, or one of every seven in that 70-year span. Hyde-Smith said it was "an exaggerated expression of regard."

The Montgomery memorial opened in April, and an early November visit to Alabama was Margie’s and my first chance to see it. But we weren’t just sight seeing. We were making a pilgrimage to a place that felt sacred as soon as we arrived.

The memorial was years in the making, and its truth-telling is generations in coming for the black communities who were terrorized by the lynchings. It was inspired by the non-profit EJI’s comprehensive research and 2015 lynching report, which added 800 murders to previously documented records. EJI founder Bryan Stevenson worked with Boston’s MASS Design Group to create displays that would evoke the brutality and killing that was an extralegal weapon of white supremacy.

EJI has documented racial lynchings in 33 states, though some had only one or two. More than 4,000 were in the former slave states of the South, with most of 300 others in bordering states. There were none in New England.

The six-acre memorial site covers a low hill a short distance off Interstate 65. It’s almost within view of downtown Montgomery, where a large pre-Civil War slave market operated, and where on the state capitol steps Jefferson Davis took the oath of office as president of the secession Confederacy. A companion Legacy Museum is across Caroline Street from the memorial.

Once inside the memorial entrance – where two sheriff’s deputies waved visitors through a metal detector – the first thing visitors see is Ghanaian sculptor Kwame Akoto-Bamfo’s life-size figures of Africans in chains. Barely-clothed, crouching and desperately reaching out, they symbolize the people who were sold into slavery – the ancestors of those who would be freed by the Civil War, shackled again by Jim Crow laws, and lynched. A sign asks visitors to not take selfies, but the afternoon Margie and I were there, no one seemed to even think about it.

A long path leads into the memorial’s hundreds of eye-level and suspended slabs, which EJI calls "monuments." The slabs are arranged by state and county. One of the first, for Burke County, Georgia, bears the name of one of the last victims of the racial-lynching era. In 1947, a group of white men shot 28-year-old Navy veteran Joe Nathan Roberts to death when he refused to say "sir" to them. He was visiting his parents when they dragged him away.

As we continued along the sloping path, the suspended slabs rose farther and farther above us, to tree-limb level and higher. Equal numbers of black and white visitors gazed up to find specific counties. There were murmurs, but not many.

Along the left wall, a series of small plaques describe a few of the lynchings. Jack Turner was killed in Choctaw County, Alabama in 1882 for organizing black voters. Calvin Mike was killed in 1884 in Calhoun County, Georgia, for voting. A white mob burned his house and also killed his elderly mother and his two young daughters. In 1933, Birmingham, Alabama school teacher Elizabeth Lawrence was murdered after she scolded white children who threw rocks at her.

The last wall in the passage pays respect to "thousands of unknown victims" killed in out-of-the way places. A thin sheet of water ripples down the dark gray wall -- an echo of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s exhortation from the Hebrew Bible prophet Amos, to let justice roll down like waters.

From there we stepped back into the sunlight, at a set of stone steps that lead up to a grassy knoll – a symbol, a sign explains, of the public sites where many of the murders were committed. The main path toward the entrance leads beyond the knoll through a duplicate set of the slabs, laid and stacked like caskets. In 2019 EJI will begin offering them to any counties that will claim and display them.

Margie and I were quiet for a long stretch of the drive down I-65. The specter of lynching trees lingered, but so did another image. At the memorial, the victims who were less than human to their killers now rise, not just in death but also in spirit -- named, honored and remembered.

Former Patriot Ledger reporter Lane Lambert is an Alabama native and a descendant of a Confederate Army veteran.

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